Menu

Life, SSA, God, forever

Monthly Archives: July 2009

I moved into a new place on Sunday. Basically I am borrowing a room in someone’s house before I find somewhere more permanent. It’s kind of disconcerting living in a place that will never feel like a home. In this situation that’s just the way it is and the person I am boarding off is doing me a big favour that saved me from having to look for a place before or during my holidays. But I’m someone who thrives when I have that sense of home.

For me a good home is like a base to retreat to after a hard day at work or out, and recharge. A place I can be totally myself in and just chill. It’s somewhere that I can keep my stuff and cook my five vegetables each day. I always feel that my life goes better when I have a good home base. It’s as if I can approach the world with confidence and freshness because I have somewhere comfortable and familiar when I need to escape.

Apart from living with my parents this is the fifth shared house I have been part of and I’m likely to have another couple in the next few years as well. But I’m thinking my life will go better if I can find an area I want to settle in and buy a house and truly have my own base to use as a launch pad for life.

My three week break from work and two weeks in New South Wales was great. I enjoyed it immensely. My holiday was actually my first single holiday (vacation) where I went away by myself on a trip I organised myself. I enjoyed exploring a part of the country I’d never taken the time to experience before and spending time with my mate. It’s kind of awoken a desire in me to travel some more and explore. I don’t really want to do touristy things, so much as I want to walk streets, enjoy parks, eat at food places and soak in the way of life in another part of the world. Obviously this would be better done overseas, but I think I’ll have to find a travelling companion before I do too much of that.

I also want to go back to Sydney and spend some more time there. It has a different feel to Melbourne and is a lot prettier. I was in Melbourne on Friday and it kind of seems ugly compared to Sydney with its harbour and natural beauty. I don’t think I’d want to live there though. A harbour is impractical for traversing with freeways and train lines. Though I did have a really cool time with my sister in Melbourne.

While in Sydney I went to the SSA retreat I may have mentioned a few times in the past couple of months on here, haha. It was at the most beautiful harbourside location imaginable and I’m really glad I went. As always it was great to spend time with others dealing with the same stuff. It was a week and a half ago now, so I’ll just share a couple of my after thoughts. Stuff like this makes me feel so very broken. Just focusing on it for 48 hours straight means I can’t escape it and have to think about it and deal with it. I think that’s a good thing. As I was sitting on the train at Sydney central station waiting to be taken back to my mate’s house a few tears did roll down my face as I thought about this situation. This brokenness and all the year’s the locusts have eaten. The restoration I’ve been experiencing in massive amounts recently doesn’t change the fact it hurt like hell to be a teenager dealing with SSA.

The other stand out memory is just the power of being with other people dealing with the same stuff. I love just being in a room full of people who all know to some degree what it is like to struggle with SSA. There’s just an openness that doesn’t require words or explanations. It’s a kind of knowing people can bask in. When the retreat ended I walked a kilometre to the bus stop, took a 20 min bus ride into Sydney (across the harbour bridge, woot) and then I was walking the streets of the city with a hundred strangers. It was kind of surreal and I felt the thud of rejoining the ‘real world’.